On Friday, March 29, the main building of the Highlander Research and
Education Center in New Market, Tennessee, was burned down in an arson
fire. The center describes itself as a "catalyst for grassroots
organizing and movement building in Appalachia and the South" that works
"with people fighting for justice, equality and sustainability." After
the fire, the center said in a news release that they "found a symbol
connected to the white-power movement spray-painted on the parking lot
connected to the main office." It appears the fascist white-supremacist
symbol was put there by the perpetrators of the arson.

No one was killed or hurt in the Highlander arson, but the center
said the fire destroyed "decades of historic documents, speeches,
artifacts and memorabilia from movements of all kinds, including the
civil-rights movement." The center has a long connection with the civil-rights movement, including training Rosa Parks before she refused to
give up her seat on a segregated bus, sparking the 1955 Montgomery bus
boycott that brought the fight against Jim Crow into national focus.

The sign found spray-painted on the center's premises was a symbol
that looks like a hashtag with three vertical and three horizontal
lines, which was first used by the Iron Guard, a fascist movement in
Romania in the 1930s and '40s. More recently, this symbol has been used
by some fascist "white power" forces in various parts of the world.
Notably, the internet-white-supremacist fascist who invaded two mosques
in New Zealand this March and murdered 50 people--livestreaming it on
Facebook with the aim of inciting other fascists and racists--had the
same symbol painted on one of the guns he used in the massacre. The Iron
Guard symbol has also been used by fascists in the U.S., including some
involved in the 2017 "Unite the Right" march of neo-Nazi white
supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which protester Heather
Heyer was murdered by one of the fascists--and after which Trump said
there were "very fine people" among the fascist-KKK goons.

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This attack in Tennessee--and other attacks on black and other
oppressed people, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, and women--are happening in
the context of undisguised white supremacy coming from the highest
levels of the U.S. ruling class. There is a president in the White House
now who said after the mass murders at the mosques in New Zealand, when
asked if if he thinks that "white nationalism" (that is, white-
supremacist fascism) is a significant problem, said, "I don't really";
who paints all immigrants as "criminals"; and who attacks protesters
against Confederate monuments for "trying to take away our heritage."
This is whipping up an intensifying fascist, racist wave in the South
and elsewhere around the country.1

Here are just a few recent examples:

Just two days after the Highlander arson fire, a memorial dedicated
to slaves and black workers at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill was vandalized with urine and racist graffiti written in
permanent marker. University officials said one of the people allegedly
involved has ties to a group called Heirs to the Confederacy.

In October of last year, a white man cold-bloodedly shot and killed
an older black man and woman in a supermarket parking lot near
Louisville, Kentucky. Not all the circumstances around the killings are
clear or known publicly, and the alleged shooter's motives are not
known. But before murdering the two black people, the shooter had tried
and failed to get into a black church, and a man who confronted the
alleged killer reported that the gunman said, "Don't shoot me. I won't
shoot you. Whites don't shoot whites."

The Kentucky murders took place in the same week as two other major
developments: pipe bombs were sent to the homes and offices of top
Democratic leaders, particularly prominent black figures, as well as
wealthy liberals of Jewish descent and CNN. And a white-supremacist
gunman murdered 11 Jewish people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh as he
shouted, "All Jews must die."

In November of last year, a white male gunman shot and killed
two women at a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida, before killing
himself. The man was a self-proclaimed misogynist (hater of women) who
posted videos and songs online proclaiming and advocating hatred and
violence against women, black people, gays, and Muslims.

Around the time of the Highlander Center arson, three black churches
in the rural St. Landry Parish in Louisiana were hit by arson. On April
10, a young white man, son of a deputy sheriff, was arrested and
charged with the arson of the churches. At this point, there have been
no reported statements from the man himself and his motives are not
clear or made public. But the burning down of black churches
cannot be separated from the current overall climate of rising white
supremacist threats and violence, and the NAACP has called the arson of
the Louisiana churches "hate crimes."

For decades, there has been a growing fascist section in this
country, including at top levels of power. To them, America was "great"
when it was unmistakably white, Christian, and male-dominated, and the
USA had unrivaled dominance over the world--but it's gone to hell since.
They find even the partial concessions that black and other oppressed
people won in recent decades to be intolerable, and this hatred-along
with the same hatred directed at gains won by women and blatant "USA #1"
madness--is a big part of what fuels this fascist movement.

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The Republican Party is the main vehicle of this fascism. But the
Democratic opponents of Trump have no real answers either. In fact they,
too, support white supremacy, in a less blatant form. Just look at how
Bill Clinton opened his run for presidency by making a special trip to
witness the execution of a brain-damaged black prisoner and then posing
in front of a chain gang of black prisoners at Stone Mountain, Georgia
(a monument to the Confederacy), as a signal to racist whites that he
would keep black people in their "place"--and then, as a major part of
his presidency, oversaw and pushed through repressive laws and policies
that greatly expanded mass incarceration, particularly of black and
other oppressed people.2
Or look at how Obama constantly put the blame for the whole oppressive
situation blacks and Latinos face on the people themselves, preaching
that the problem was youths with saggy pants, "absentee fathers," and so
on--and how he attacked youths who rose up in Baltimore against the
police murder of Freddie Gray as "thugs," while his In-justice
Department never prosecuted a single murdering pig.3
The Democratic Party must uphold this white supremacy because the
system they uphold and serve--capitalism-imperialism--has had white
supremacy so tightly interwoven into its every fiber that you cannot get
rid of the one without totally uprooting the other.

The arson of the Highlander Center and other incidents involving
fascist white supremacists are the crest of what is objectively shaping
up in society. On one side are those like the NRA and various other
neo-Nazi, KKK-type groups openly threatening civil war against anything
positive in society--while at the very top, Trump openly agitates for
violence by his fascist followers and minions (like exhorting his crowds
to chant "Lock Them Up!"), and moves to ratchet up repression by the
state against immigrants and others. On the other side are the Democrat
leaders trying to corral the opposition into "acceptable channels," even
as they are one of the targets of the fascist forces.

Whether people are now cowed by or instead stand up to these fascist white-supremacist attacks--and how this struggle is fought
politically--has urgent implications for where the world is headed. There
are real stakes in countering the storm troopers, and their leaders and
representatives, in every sphere in society, doing so as part of a
broader movement to drive out the fascist regime--and, in terms of the
future of humanity, as part of advancing the 3 Prepares: Prepare the
Ground, Prepare the People, and Prepare the Vanguard--Get Ready for the
Time When Millions Can Be Led to Go for Revolution, All-Out, With a Real
Chance to Win.

____________________

1. According to a report from the Center
for Strategic and International Studies: Between 2007 and 2011, the
number of [violent right-wing] attacks was five or less per year. They
then rose to 14 in 2012; continued at a similar level between 2012 and
2016, with a mean of 11 attacks and a median of 13 attacks; and then
jumped to 31 in 2017.

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